By Pauline Rose, director of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report, and Albert Motivans, head of Education Statistics at the UNESCO Institute for Statistics

Millions of children may be denied access to school due to reductions in aid, according to new data released today in a new policy paper from the EFA Global Monitoring Report team and the UNESCO Institute of Statistics (UIS). The paper shows that progress towards universal primary education has stagnated, while international aid to basic education has fallen for the first time since 2002. Less than 1,000 days before the 2015 deadline to achieve universal primary education, 57 million children remain out of school.

After pledging to achieve universal primary education at the World Education Forum in  2000, the world made great progress in reducing the number of out-of-school children from 102 million to 70.5 million. Progress stagnated in 2005, however, and out-of-school numbers dropped…